by Matthew Kowal, Majestic Collaborations
Bring Your Team, Build Your System
How sending a small, cross-functional team to ReadyWhen in New Orleans can become a practicum for how your institution shows up when it matters.
All events are events. The logistics don’t care whether it’s a museum gala, a campus emergency, or a neighborhood street festival — the same systems come online. Someone handles communications, someone monitors safety, someone manages accessibility, someone decides what happens if plans change.
If you’re reading this, you’re probably one of those people. The one everyone turns to when a decision has to be made in real time. Maybe you run the building, maybe you lead operations, or maybe you’re the person who quietly keeps the whole thing standing. Either way, you’re closer to sparking lasting institutional change than you might think.
This April, during the ReadyWhen Foundations Certificate in New Orleans, you can bring that system — your system — into the same room. You can come on your own, or with a small internal team of three to five people that spans your core functions, and spend two days using a massive live event as a practicum. First, you study “the event” itself in rotating learning stations throughout French Quarter Festival. Then, you step back the next day to unpack specific elements at The National WWII Museum, zooming out to the whole cultural district and zooming back in to concrete topics like communications, power, access, and crowd movement.
This is not a generic workshop. It’s a deliberately designed practicum built from hundreds of hours of Art of Mass Gatheringsconvenings and the combined experience of people who have collectively logged more than a century in cultural resilience, emergency management, and live event operations — including the teams at Performing Arts Readiness and Majestic Collaborations. A structured set of online micro‑credentials in crowd safety, emergency power, food systems, accessibility, and incident command wraps around the fieldwork, so you leave with both lived experience and a targeted course of study that shows you’ve done serious work at the intersection of culture, safety, and emergency practice.
When Every System Runs at Once
I got to know Christopher Singh when we presented our Train for Strain program together, and it crystallized something I’d already felt working with IFCPP members for years. That series drew more than 120 registrants who were hungry for practical, real-world examples of how cultural institutions manage strain. ASIS was an essential partner in that work, helping gather professionals who sit at the intersection of security, operations, and public trust.
Christopher is Senior Security Manager at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, overseeing emergency preparedness for one of the world’s most complex cultural institutions. At the Met Gala, his team manages A-list Hollywood stars, museum guests, demonstrations, and film shoots — all happening at the same time, in the same building. That’s not just “a big night.” That’s what it looks like when multiple systems — safety, hospitality, security, public image, collections care — are all running at once under heavy strain.
People like Christopher, and many of the professionals I’ve met through IFCPP and ASIS, care for people in places. They understand duty of care not as a legal phrase, but as a daily practice: protecting staff, visitors, and collections while multiple levels of activity, needs, threats, and delight are unfolding simultaneously. This is why the IFCPP conference and organization is beloved and it’s worth staying the whole week if this is also your function.
ReadyWhen was built with that reality in mind. The goal isn’t to add one more plan to your shelf, but to offer strategies and operational integration that work for your everyday events as well as your worst‑day emergencies, and to package that learning in a way that reads as serious, intentional work to peers, partners, and funders. The content draws from some of the most active practitioners at this intersection in the U.S. right now, and it’s designed less as a one‑off training and more as a way to make learning stick inside your institution.
A Template You Can Steal
In Denver, Youth on Record is sending a four-person delegation to ReadyWhen — their Executive Director, Programming Director, and two emerging young leaders. Together, they’re building long-term capacity for safety and operations leadership across their city’s cultural venues.
Youth on Record is doing something bigger than a single training trip. They’re treating this as part of a workforce development strategy — preparing young professionals who will carry operational, safety, and resilience roles into venues, festivals, museums, and sports facilities for years to come. The delegation they’re sending now is a seed for a future bench of people who understand both culture and crisis, and can move between those worlds.
Their approach is straightforward and portable: an internal application process, shared travel and tuition investment, and a clear promise to bring what they learn back home. It’s a clean way to align professional development with civic readiness — and a glimpse of how a single program can ripple through an entire local ecosystem of venues and institutions.
If you lead a cultural institution, university arts program, venue, or city cultural office, you can borrow this model. Start by asking a simple question: On our most complicated days, who really runs this place? Then write down the names you think of from:
- Operations and production
- Safety and security
- Accessibility and guest services
- Facilities and engineering
- Communications and external affairs
- Front-of-house
That list is the beginning of your cadre — the people who already make things work when it’s busy, messy, or uncertain. ReadyWhen gives them a shared set of reference points and a common training language.
Invite Your Executive Leadership
And if you’re not the top decision-maker, bring your big boss along for this one.
The ReadyWhen program includes dedicated content for senior leaders — how preparedness-based frameworks can expand institutional capacity, attract funders, and align safety with mission delivery. For executives, it’s not just a training trip; it’s a chance to see how their organization fits into the broader resilience picture of their city and to hear, in real time, how their own staff see the system.
When leadership and frontline operators go through the same experience, it becomes much easier to make the case for resources, policy changes, and long‑term investments afterward.
What Might Be Different After
We’re capping this first ReadyWhen cohort at about 60 participants, and we’re already more than halfway there. Some people will come alone; others will be part of a small internal team. The throughline is the same: a commitment to bring the learning back into the way your institution actually works.
What happens back home will look different for every organization. But you can reasonably expect a few things:
- Conversations about safety and operations are grounded in shared examples from the field and the museum classrooms.
- People who didn’t normally sit together now have at least one structured experience and a common curriculum to point back to.
- When a plan or incident action outline is on the table, more of your team can see how their piece fits into the whole — and how it connects to the micro‑credential content they completed.
Once you’ve walked a complex event as a learning environment, and tied that to a focused curriculum, it’s hard to unsee the systems. That shift in perspective is where better decisions and better coordination start.
If you’ve read this far, you’re probably the one who can make it happen. Look at your org chart. Notice who already finds each other when things get complicated. Maybe that’s a small group you can bring. Maybe, this year, it’s you. Either way, get yourself into the room in New Orleans while there’s still space, and let’s study what’s really going on when an entire cultural district comes to life.
ReadyWhen Foundations Certificate April 18–19, 2026 – New Orleans Learn more & register → About the New Orleans program with IFCPP
